Ten Lebanese universities among top 100 in the Arab world

The QS University Rankings for 2016 included 10 Lebanese universities among 100 ranked universities in the Arab region, Byblos Bank's Lebanon This Week reported.

The American University of Beirut (AUB) was the highest ranked institution in Lebanon and the second highest ranked in the Arab world, with an overall score of 98.5 points out of a maximum of 100 points. It was followed by the Lebanese American University (LAU) in 15th place (71.5 points), Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth (USJ) in 17th place (69.7 points), the University of Balamand in 28th place (55.3 points), the Lebanese University in 31st place (49.7 points), Notre Dame University in 38th place (42.8 points) and the Beirut Arab University in 39th place (42.6 points). Also, the survey ranked the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik within the 61-70 range regionally (30.8 points), while it ranked the Hariri Canadian University (26.7 points) in the 71-80 range and Université Antonine (23.1 points) in the 91-100 range.

The Lebanese University and USJ's rankings improved by three spots year-on-year, the largest increase among the top 10 universities in Lebanon, while AUB's rank was unchanged year-on-year. In contrast, the rank of the Beirut Arab University regressed by seven spots from the 2015 survey, followed by NDU (-5 spots), the University of Balamand (-3 spots) and LAU (-1 spots). Further, the rank of the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik was in the 51-60 range and the rankings of the Hariri Canadian University and Université Antonine were in the 81-90 range last year.

Saudi Arabia accounted for three of the top 10 universities in the Arab world, including the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals that came in first place; Egypt and the UAE each had two universities; while Lebanon, Jordan and Qatar each had one university among the top 10. The rankings are based on a weighted average of six factors that are academic reputation with a 30% weight, facultyto-student ratio and employer reputation with 20% each, web impact (10%), proportion of staff with PhDs (5%), citations per paper and papers per faculty (5% each), as well as the ratio of international faculty to the total number of faculty members and the ratio of international students to the overall number of students (2.5% each). The QS University Rankings are compiled by Quacquarelli Symonds Limited, a company specializing in education and study abroad. The QS University Rankings for the Arab Region were first published as a pilot edition in 2014. QS assessed 270 institutions, of which 192 had enough data to be ranked and were sufficiently broad-based to be included in the top 100 list.

The study said that universities in Lebanon perform well on the Web Impact criterion, as the ranks of six out of the top 10 universities improved year-on-year. The Web Impact metric measures the extent to which a university is increasing its international profile. The study noted that the better performance on the Web Impact metric mitigates the drop in the score of eight universities in Lebanon on the citations per paper category. Also, the performance of the top 10 universities in Lebanon deteriorated on the international students ratio metric.